“References, the mechanism scientists rely on to signal previous knowledge, lately have turned into widely used and misused measures of scientific impact. Yet, when a discovery becomes common knowledge, citations suffer from obliteration by incorporation. This leads to the concept of hidden citation, representing a clear textual credit to a discovery without a reference to the publication embodying it. … We show that the prevalence of hidden citations is not driven by citation counts … indicating that the more discussed is a discovery, the less visible it is to standard bibliometric analysis.”

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